Amy Ballon - Mom Inc.: How to Raise Your Family and Your Business Without Losing Your Mind or Your Shirt

How to raise your family and your business
without losing your mind or your shirt

AMY BALLON &
DANIELLE BOTTERELL

with Rebecca Reuber, Ph.D.

In memory of Amys mother, Jerry Ballon, and Danielles grandmother, Yvonne Goldbergmompreneurs ahead of their time.

And to our children, Jessie, Kyra, and Lily; and Charlie and Evemay you follow your bliss.

If youre reading this book, its likely because youre experiencing that uneasy feeling that many women before you have felt. It may have started creeping into your thoughts a little at a time, or it may have hit you like a ton of bricks. However you came to it, youre aware, and not in a good way, of the tension that exists between career and family. So, what to do?

If you had told us when we were in university that we would become entrepreneurs, we would have laughed out loud. (Frankly, if you had told us that wed be buying Barbie dolls for our future daughters we would have laughed at that too.) No, we hadnt toughed it out for years downtown and then put ourselves through business school to pursue long days in a poorly heated basementour visions were much more grandiose. We were going to meet each other for power lunches, in fabulous pantsuits, in between business trips. Over a glass of white wine we would whip out our leather Filofaxes (this was before BlackBerrys) to plan our next rendezvous. We were going to conquer the corporate world.

It didnt turn out that way. Business school was great. We learned lots, but more tangibly, we graduated with offers for our dream jobs in our pockets. Our starting salaries were ridiculously high. We would work at these corporate jobs, we thought, until we were ready to have children and then we would re-evaluate our careers. After giving birth wed return to work part-time or find jobs that promised more reasonable hours.

What really happened was that we were forced to make these choices much sooner than wed anticipated.

Graduating from business school in 2000 and 2001 respectively, Amy worked as a management consultant for a year before getting laid off; Danielle had her job offer rescinded as the economy tanked and never got the chance to start. The economic downturn that occurred as a result of the events of September 11, 2001, meant that we both found ourselves highly educated and seriously unemployed.

At the same time, Amys mother, Jerry (an extraordinary woman and a heck of a mompreneurbeloved by us both), was in the midst of a terminal illness. Spending time with her in her final months forced us to prioritize what was really important to us in our personal lives. During this time we had a lot of opportunity to sit around and just think.

What could we do, we wondered, to put our degrees to use but avoid going back to corporate life? What would allow us to keep a foot in the business world while enabling us to be available for our families? We were thirty years old and both had babies on the brain. How on earth were we going to manage our high-powered careers while raising our children?

A mom we know told us that when working downtown she always felt like she left the office too early and got home too late. We too had the sinking feeling that no matter where we were, wed feel like we should be in the other place. The bottom line? We wanted out of the rat race. But we still wanted to work, to learn, to be engaged in something beyond diapers and Sesame Street. We knew better than to buy into the myth of the Supermom. Weve never believed that we could do everything at the same time. But we do believe that we have the power to choose which of the things we want most.

With this in mind, it was time to forge a new path. We didnt know it at the time, but we were about to become mompreneursthat is, business owners who are juggling their work and their families at once. In 2002, we founded Admiral Road Designs, named for the street where our basement apartment World Headquarters was located. Since then, weve been shipping cozy, personalized fleece blankets to thousands of happy kids around the world. Weve celebrated many successes and milestones, suffered many disappointments, and generally experienced the highs and lows of anyone who starts a business. At the same time, weve tried to balance the needs of our families with those of our company. Weve learned a ton, met wonderful customers, suppliers, and employees, and generally had a terrific go of it so far, with the best yet to come, we hope.

(Before we continue, we want to state emphatically that we have nothing but admiration for the many bright, talented, creative, and most important, patient women who are full-time moms. We know and love many such moms and have often wondered on which side the grass is greener. All we know is that we arent cut out for full-time, straight-up mommyhood. Same goes for the women who work outside the home full-time, whether because they must or because they just love it. This book is meant to dispel the myths and highlight the truths of mompreneurship without judgment on those who choose otherwise.)

The parallels between giving birth to a child and giving birth to a business are not insignificant. In this book, we will take you through the process of whats involved in planning, conceiving, and raising your businessall in the context of motherhood. We want to provide a practical framework in which to consider the question, Is mompreneurship for me? We will suggest ways to generate and evaluate your ideas. Well then take you through the process of how to plan and eventually run your business.

And drawing on the experiences of other mompreneurs, well talk about what its like to be engaged in starting your own company with a baby stuck to your boob. Or in a meeting with a Cheerio stuck to your butt (we have actual experience with this one). Well address what you truly need to consider when juggling the competing demands of a growing child and a growing business. Well also let you in on what mompreneurs know about being truly successful. It is our hope that youll refer back to sections in this book that are relevant to you as you experience them with your own venture.

We believe that mompreneurship is about accepting trade-offs, making choices, and focusing on the things that matter to you most. We hope this book will help you determine what those things areits one of the main reasons we wanted to write it.

We want to share with you tales from the trenches. Were not talking about lessons we learned in business school. (We learned a lot there, but an MBA is by no means a prerequisite to having a successful business.) The experiences weve had as mompreneurs have made us laugh, cry, and cringe in disbelief. Weve enjoyed the camaraderie of other women and have been backstabbed by the sisterhood. Weve seen ideas that range from the innovative to the inane. Weve witnessed plenty of start-up successes and failures (our own and others).

When we began to think about this book, we had a good base of knowledge from our own experiences as well as those of our mompreneur friends. But we wanted to paint as broad a picture as possible. So we sat down and had conversations with more than fifty mompreneurs. We talked to women in multi-million-dollar businesses, and women who are struggling to make ends meet. We met women whose businesses blew up and women who have opened up and conquered whole new categories. We met with partners, sole proprietors, single moms, gay moms, and moms of children with special needs. We talked to mompreneurs about their marriages, their bank accounts, and the state of their health. They told us about the difficulties of juggling children and business, their pride and sense of accomplishment, and the many ways that they define success. They shared not only their war stories, but also their advice and tips for the mompreneurs who come after them.